An American army soldier who defected to the Soviet Union to be a snake handler in Turkmenia was married Saturday in Ashkhabad to his West German girlfriend. The official news agency Tass reported the wedding of Wade E. Roberts, formerly of San Bernardino, Calif., and Petra Neumann, formerly of Giessen, in a dispatch from Ashkhabad. In the past, however, Tass had referred to the couple as man and wife and quoted Neumann as saying she was expecting a baby.

Living on charity and temporarily a man without a country, Wade E. Roberts is a troubled and angry young man. The 22-year-old Californian made international headlines by fleeing his U.S. Army unit in West Germany last March and defecting to the Soviet Union. Now he's in the news again because he wants to go home. But Roberts understands that he faces charges of desertion at a military court-martial and probably a prison sentence if he returns to the United States. He's not ready for that.

Relatives and friends of Wade Evan Roberts, a former resident of the Riverside-San Bernardino area, were shaken Friday, but military officials still were not certain that he is the man reported by the Soviet Union to be a defector from the U.S. Army. "I'm just in shock," said his mother, Alta Worley of Apple Valley. "I'm numb. I can't believe it happened. He should never have done that while he was in the Army. . . . He shouldn't have deserted the Army. It's very shameful. It's a disgrace."

A missing former Navy enlisted man, who had special intelligence clearances and who is the subject of an FBI espionage investigation, has shown up in Moscow and been granted political asylum. The Soviet newspaper Izvestia announced Sunday that "Glen Michael Souter" asked for asylum because "he had to hide from the U.S. special services, which were pursuing him groundlessly." The newspaper identified him only as a U.S. citizen and did not say how long he had been in the Soviet Union.

In America, he is known as Joel Barr, an enthusiastic Communist from Brooklyn who disappeared without a trace in the late 1940s. In Russia, he is known as Iosif Veniaminovich Berg, half of a team of brilliant Americans who designed the first Soviet computer and pioneered the microelectronics industry so critical to the Kremlin's defense machine. But in his St.

The court-martial of Michael A. Peri, the Orange County soldier charged with supplying the East German government with secret information about U.S. troop movements in Germany, has been postponed to allow attorneys additional time to prepare for the military trial. No new date was set to begin the court-martial, originally scheduled to be held Monday, according to Lt. Col. Jake Dye, spokesman for the 5th Army Corps in Fulda, West Germany. Dye said the postponement "was mutually agreed upon" by prosecutors and Peri's defense attorneys.

The Army on Monday charged intelligence specialist Michael Peri with leaving his post without permission, a security violation and petty theft, but it would not say whether the 21-year-old soldier from Orange County had illegally entered East Germany. Peri, 21, a specialist fourth class whose family lives in Laguna Niguel, disappeared from the U.S. military base in Fulda, West Germany, on Feb. 20, but turned himself into military authorities at the base Saturday.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin has granted citizenship to a U.S. medical researcher who defected to Moscow with his family in 1986, claiming he was being harassed for his Communist sympathies. A decree signed by Yeltsin on Aug. 6 and published by the Itar-Tass news agency Sunday said the president has granted a request by cancer specialist Arnold Lockshin for citizenship of the Russian Federation.